Recent years have seen significant increases in both technologies for, and use of, digital photography. Indeed, the advent of smart phones with integrated, high quality cameras has led to large percentages of people carrying digital cameras with them almost constantly. This has led to massive increases in the number of digital photos being taken. Not only has the number of digital photographs recently increased, so has the ease and speed of sharing digital photographs. For example, smart phones with social networking applications, allow users to share digital photographs almost immediately after capture. Users now seek to capture and share the “perfect picture” as quickly as possible.
One recent advance in aiding photographers in capturing high quality photographs is burst mode or continuous shooting. Digital cameras with burst mode capture multiple frames or images per second. Indeed, digital cameras with burst mode can capture tens of images per second. Burst mode photography helps photographers capture a high-quality image in various different types of moments. For example, using burst mode during an action moment (like a child blowing out candles), allows a photographer to capture dozens of images of the moment and select the exact desired instance of the moment. Thus, burst mode allows for the capture of events, which because of the fast rate of occurrence, can be difficult to capture with manual shooting.
Burst mode also is very beneficial in capturing group portraits, as it allows a photographer to increase the odds of capturing an image with everyone in the group looking forward with their eyes open. Additionally, photographers often use burst mode to capture moments lacking action or people, so as to have multiple different images from which to select an aesthetically pleasing image.
While burst mode photography provides various advantages, burst mode photography also presents a number of drawbacks. For example, conventional burst mode photography systems typically require the user to review and compare each of potentially dozens of images to identify a desired or high-quality image of a moment. Reviewing burst mode images to select a high or highest quality image can be both tedious and time consuming because of the difficulty in comparing such similar images. Furthermore, the use of handheld devices with relatively small displays exacerbates these problems. The time and effort associated with selecting a high-quality burst mode image can deter users from employing burst mode when they are trying to capture and share an image quickly.
In addition to the foregoing, the use of burst mode photography can quickly fill storage space on image capturing devices. As such, users often have to search through burst mode images not only to select high quality images, but to delete un-wanted images to free up storage space. Thus, the storage space that burst mode photography uses, particularly with devices that capture high-quality images with larger storage sizes, deters users from employing burst mode photography.
Recent photo management systems provide the ability to automatically classify digital images as high-quality images or low-quality images. Such binary classifications, however, are typically unhelpful when analyzing burst mode images as burst mode images often have the same binary quality. Furthermore, such binary rating systems often fail to account for differences between image context when rating images.
These and other problems exist with conventional image capture and management systems.